I don't always agree with DBH, and often when I do, I wince at his aggressive rhetoric, but this time I can absolutely agree with what he writes, and applaud the way he does it.
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A Brief Political Confession
by David Bentley Hart
Forgive me for stepping out from behind the curtain here, but I can think of nowhere else to post this. It has come to my attention that there have been some debates online, in a variety of forums, regarding my political convictions. Why anyone cares very much, I cannot say, but I am of course flattered. It even seems, however, that there are those who want to conscript me into their own political causes. Again, I am flattered, but I am also somewhat disturbed. In fact, apparently a comic feuilleton that I published about nine years ago—about a letter J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son, where he professed to being drawn simultaneously toward anarchism and toward a purely ceremonial monarchism—has been seized on by a few of these disputants as some kind of personal “monarchist” manifesto. I find this a mite bizarre, since that piece was nothing but an idle fantasy on how nice it would be if there were no need for a political class at all, and we all lived in a kind of agrarian utopia, and the only government were a totally powerless (and ideally somewhat inbred) monarch whose only interests were Dresden china and fly-fishing. How anyone could mistake that for a serious statement of political philosophy, I honestly cannot imagine. I am fond of the piece, and regard it as a good specimen of the sort of light extemporanea I particularly enjoy writing; but that is all. I have also been informed by an acquaintance who does some publicity work that these debates have resulted in interventions on the part of some person or persons unknown in the text of the brief Wikipedia page devoted to me. Apparently, someone does not want me to be identified as a democratic socialist there, though that is in fact what I am.
I have to say, for those in the academy familiar with my technical work, there could scarcely be much confusion on this score. From my very first publications onward, my political leanings have been almost ostentatiously on display in my scholarly writings. But I suppose it would be wise to make things clear here. I apologize in advance to anyone who might find my views a disappointment; but, again, it does not seem to me to be something that many people should care about.
I have never belonged to any political party except the Democratic Socialists of America; I am a member even now. Moreover, contrary to some opinions expressed online, my membership in the DSA is not simply an act of ironic political theatre, or a sullen expression of my contrarian disposition. I am quite a contented and convinced son of the European Christian Socialist tradition; I was formed in early in life by William Morris and John Ruskin, among other worthies of that sort; and socialism is my politics in the short term. In the long term, as the eschatological horizon of my political vision, as it were, I am drawn to something like Pyotr Kropotkin’s anarcho-communism, however unrealizable it may be within history. One needs a Utopia to strive for and fall short of. I have, moreover, no interest in or sympathy for—in fact, am temperamentally averse and morally hostile to—any forms of political conservatism: neo-conservatism, palaeo-conservatism, “lost-cause” conservatism, monarcho-conservatism, theo-conservatism, or any other. The true conservatives I have known in my life have generally struck me as suffering from a somewhat bilious resentment of the simple and inevitable fact of social change, and from a jealous desire to freeze reality in an image of a past they only think they recall or understand. To me, that would be an emotionally exhausting way to live. I take Heracleitus as my guide here, and recognize that you really cannot step in the same river twice. If the present appalls you, seek things eternal, like love and justice; but let the dead bury their dead. I also dislike every form of libertarianism, which among all the expressions of the American political mind strikes me as the most incompatible with Christianity.
I realize that in America, alone among nations with developed economies, the word “socialism” has a sinister ring in many ears. I take this as a symptom of our unique national genius for stupidity. I am well aware of how badly the various parts of a “socialized” economy can at times be managed (the tales I could tell of my experiences with the NHS); but, well managed, they make for a far more humane governing philosophy than ours, and one that comes as close to something like “Distributist” justice in the use of property and wealth as we can hope for under current circumstances. So I find it very odd that, when we look at those nations of northern and western Europe that enjoy the benefits of sane socialist policies, as a result of both their Social Democratic and their Christian Democratic traditions—nations, like Germany or Denmark or France, where the cost of healthcare per capita is far lower and yet coverage is universal, where life spans are longer, where working people are not rendered bankrupt by serious illnesses, where the children of the poor cannot be denied expensive treatments by predatory insurance adjusters, where people have far more savings in bank and endure much lower levels of debt, where wages generally keep pace with inflation, where every worker has decent vacation time each year, where suicide and opioid addiction are not the default lifestyle of the working poor, where homelessness has been nearly abolished, where retirement care is humane and comprehensive, where schools are immeasurably better, where literacy is far higher…—we recoil in horror and thank God that we are free from such things. Surely, we tell ourselves, these are curses, only a few steps away from the gulags. We know that civic wealth is not meant for civic welfare, but is supposed to be diverted into the pockets of the military-industrial complex, by the needless purchase each year of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons systems that will never be used, or is supposed to be squandered through unneeded tax cuts for the very richest of the investment class. We know that when the child of a working family is diagnosed with cancer, that the child should be denied the most expensive treatments, even if they alone can possibly save him or her, and then should probably die, and that his or her family should be utterly impoverished in the process. We call this, I believe, being free. And, as long as we have access to all the guns we could ever need to fight off invasions from Venus, what more can we ask?
Anyway, there it is. Excuse the interruption. Best to all—DBH.
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(DBH is a North American, Eastern Orthodox philosopher and theologian. Source: DBH's FB page, today.)
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